Fascination with Sanskrit …

Ever since we have had a new Govt. at the Centre, one is witness to efforts being made to revive Sanskrit from its rarefied position to the mainstream. A recent heading in Times of India dated Nov 13, 2017 caught my eyes: “Raj may make Sanskrit compulsory in schools.” Here is a part of the report in verbatim: “Rajasthan education department may make Sanskrit a compulsory third language from Class IV to Class X in state board schools to ensure that students have access to ‘ancient wisdom regarding Bharat Varsha. Currently students have the option to choose their third language from Sanskrit, Punjabi, Gujrati, Urdu, Sindhi and Bengali.”

Some questions naturally arise: Was a Committee of Experts formed that looked into the merits and demerits of all these six languages, and decided that the other five languages have outlived their importance, and that only Sanskrit need to be retained because it is the language of the future. The other pertinent question would be “Can we find so many good enough Sanskrit teachers all of a sudden?”

As a Hindu, whenever we recite our prayers during Pujas, the priest recite something profound in Sanskrit and without understanding a single word of what is being said, we repeat the uttering of the priest and complete our duty of paying obeisance to our Gods…a believer often doesn’t need to understand everything. Likewise, not everyone in this World needs to be a linguist; not everyone needs to appreciate Classical music. Something that is profound can only be appreciated by the Classy and the learned.

Like Wordsworth, I believe that YARROW UNVISITED is better than YARROW VISITED.